agricultural

This past December, F2F volunteer, Melanie Forstrom traveled to Nicaragua, where she conducted interactive workshops for Junior Achievement Nicaragua (JA) facilitators and trainers to improve educational processes and teaching methodologies.  JA is a non-profit educational organization that is present in more than 120 countries. The goal of the organization is to promote economic education from an early age and empower young leaders to be proactive in their own development, both personally and professionally. It implements business education programs aimed at children and adolescents, young women, and female heads of household.  Melanie Forstom earned her Master’s degree in Conflict Transformation from the School for International Training and has spent countless years working with at-risk youth in a variety of different locations and programs throughout the United States. She currently leads youth development programming in Ulster Country through the Cornell Cooperative ...

Like many places in the world, Paraguay is a country of ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’.  Tremendous inequality exists between urban centers like Asunción that have access to basic amenities like clean water, electricity, education, and internet access to people outside the city living in rural areas. There are many other challenges as well and Partners of the Americas is helping address one of them - child labor. Partners’ is implementing the Paraguay OKAKUAA, a 3-year cross-sector project between the central, departmental, and district governments in the Department of Guairá. project. It is funded by the US Department of Labor and focuses on addressing child labor issues in the sugarcane industry.  Partners' USAID-funded Farmer-to-Farmer program is collaborating with this effort.  F2F volunteer Lauren Hrncirik traveled to help start a 4-H program to help OKAKUAA meet one of it's objectives - to improve educational opportunities for children and youth in rural areas. ...

Nicaragua's agricultural sector   provides a higher rate of employment opportunities than in any other country  in Central America . This can be problematic from a development perspective, though, as 43% of these agriculturalists are under 25 and have only 3.5 to 5 years of schooling. Moreover, 72% of the population of the country has not attended secondary school. Therefore, it is important to the country's economy to support agricultural training and education with a focus on student retention and growth opportunities. Among the coalition of organizations trying to engage rural youth and build new skills is CETAA , a vocational and technical school for environmental studies and agroforestry techniques. CETAA works closely with the 7 ethnic populations in Wawashang , a remote Caribbean coastal settlement in Nicaragua. Farmer-to-Farmer volunteer Sandro Lopes, a youth-in-development professional, volunteered with CETAA to propose a strategy to implement a 4-H curriculum , a glo...